Turning back to the reflection in the salon window, I saw the yellow dress, the dark mid-neck length hair swinging of its own volition. My throat tightened with the fear I had turned into someone’s weather girl.
I moved my head again and got another rush: the erotic tickle of movement almost compensated for the weird sense of loss. Past my reflection, inside the salon, that evil Delilah-ish redhead swept blonde like dirt off the floor. I watched the dead hair pile onto a dustpan. Like leaving limbs behind.
I touched the frame of my sunglasses and gawked at my reflection again as if I were a peeping Tom. I didn’t know where or who I was, what I was doing. My cell phone rang.
“Vivian? what the hell are you doing, woman?” Erin!
“Hi.” I nearly swooned in gratitude.
“What’s going on, where are you?”
“I’m in Danaville. I’m kind of hungover and …” Jesus Christ, I’m going to start bawling.
“Attagirl!”
I could stay at her place tonight. She had an apartment in North Beach, just off Columbus Avenue.
I snapped the phone shut and started back up Main Street toward the car. “Change is good,” I said quietly. “Don’t be such a baby.” An older couple walked by holding hands. Meeting my gaze, they smiled as they passed. It settled me a little, those old people glancing with such open faces. As if they knew me. “You’re fine,” I whispered. “It’s just hair.” I copped a few more glances into car windows I passed, watching my reflection. I tried to swagger. Studied casual, my mother used to say. I stopped and stared into the window of an insurance broker. “Fuck me,” I whispered. “I look just like her.”
The bell of the insurance broker’s front door jangled and a big-bellied middle-aged man stepped out. Moving onto the sidewalk, he raised his face to the sun then turned it to me. “You weren’t looking for me, were you?” he smiled. He didn’t look at me like a normal guy would. Either I was losing my mind or this was the face I used to see men give her. Appreciative. By twelve I wanted to inspire growls instead.
“Ah no. I just …” What, I was just looking at myself? “I had to check something.” And I flip-flopped my way up the block toward the car. Throwing my stuff in the trunk, I put the top down. This’ll be good. Maybe another coffee. I was parked right in front of Starbucks. I walked in past the faces of coffee drinkers at the tables out front. They glanced up with that same bland appreciation reserved for well-behaved women.
I looked at the ground, meek, all of a sudden. This frank pleasantry from strangers—I didn’t know what to do with my face. At the counter I ordered a latte from a young woman who smiled as though we were cousins. Was I going to have to rethink my whole relationship to the world after one goddamn cut and colour? I shoved my sunglasses back over my eyes while I waited. The guy on the espresso machine gave me a sappy look and I welled up. I’d become girlie and mouse–sized and all these assholes loved it.
I missed the savage crust of my yesterday self. I wondered if my mother ever missed her old self, the ferociousness of a red mouth and black eyeliner.
Yesterday’s me was getting shunted out the door like an embarrassing relative. And yet I couldn’t imagine ever fitting this new sponge-faced, salon-haired skin either. “Could you put a little vanilla into that?” I asked and forced a smile.
“Sure,” the coffee maker said, grinning. “On the house,” he added with a whisper.
My eyes rolled behind my shades.
Driving into Annie West’s cul-de-sac, I tried to puff up: You’re driving a convertible under a screaming-blue California sky with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other. Fucking fabulous!
Parked in front of her house, I took a last drag and dropped my coffee in the cup holder, snatched a look in the rearview before I went into the back and opened my mother’s trunk to arm myself.
Envelope of glam shots and the photo album in hand, I rapped lightly on Annie’s door. No response. I rang the doorbell. Nothing.
Down the steps, I followed the pathway round back. And there she was on a lounger under a navy-and-white-striped patio umbrella, wearing baby blue polyester pants and a pink sleeveless blouse. A hat and sunglasses kept the rays off her face. She wore no makeup but some crooked hot-pink lipstick. It was hard to reconcile this short squat woman with the brazen hourglass in the picture. “Ms. West?”
She jumped and peered round from under the brim of her sun hat. “Yes? uh-huh?”
She didn’t recollect me. Incognito, I thought, like a spy. “Hello, I’m Vivian. Are you the Annie West who was once roommates with Celia Dare?”
She squared her shoulders before she pulled a cane out from under the lounger, used it to hoist herself up and angrily limped toward me. I glanced over my shoulder. “Another one of you people was here looking for her yesterday.”
“No. I mean, I was actually looking for—”
She stopped three or four feet from me. “Why don’t you give it a rest?” She stamped her cane. “You think you can bully me?”
I didn’t recall seeing a cane the day before. “No, I’m not, it’s you I’m—”
“I don’t know where she is and I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“I’m her daughter.”
“What?”
“Celia Dare was my mother.” I ripped into the envelope of pictures, purse dropping on the grass. “Here, see?”
I held up Annie’s shot, rope looped over her breasts. She stepped closer, squinting. I looked at the foot causing her to limp and back up to her hands. They were shaking now. Her face tumbled into a soft bewildered pink as she snapped the picture from my fingers.
“Where did you get this?” she demanded in a voice that meant to sound stern but had lost its oomph.
“In our basement. After the funeral.”
Annie looked almost frightened now.
“She had cancer,” I explained.
Her head quivered a nod. “Cancer?”
I stood mute.
“She’s gone?”
Just swallowing.
“She had a baby?”
“Yes.”
Inhaling in halting spasms, she put a hand to her neck just before the sobs came. The photograph dropped to the ground and I swooped in beside her, not sure whether I should touch her. Finally I took her hand and cradled her shoulders with my other arm. Moving her back to the lounger, I set her down, and tried to say soothing things: You’re okay, just sit here for a second. It’s okay. She dropped the cane and her hands covered her face as a high soft wail came through. I knelt down in the grass, as if I were trying to get small. Like some kind of apology.
Annie reached for the glass sitting on the end table and took a long gulp then wiped her eyes, shut them tight, then crumpled again. “I missed her so bad,” she said. “When did she go?”
“About a week ago.” We sat this way, her in the lounger, me on the grass until her chest stopped heaving. She reached a shaky hand over and touched the top of my head. “Y’look like her, like when I first met her.” Then she asked where we lived and frowned at my answer.
“Oh god. I need a drink. You want a lemonade or something?” She heaved herself forward. “Goddamn it,” she said, reaching for the cane again. “I twisted my ankle last night and I’m stuck using this thing like a cripple. Can you reach that?” She nodded toward the photo of herself and I stooped to pick it up. She took it from me, saying, “If you got the guts for it is right. How did you find me? I’m not in the book,” as she stood.
Inside we sat across a blonde wooden table, a lemonade and vodka in front of each of us. “You didn’t drive that old Valiant, did you?”
“No.” I was confused a second. “Oh—she sold that before I was born, I think. This one’s almost brand new. She just bought it a couple years ago.”
“I guess she didn’t go by Celia Dare. She go back to Audrey?”
“Audrey?”
“That was her name before she changed it to Celia. Audrey, uh …?”
&nbs
p; “Callwood. Her real name was Josephine Callwood.”
“Callwood? Huh, that sounds fancy. She liked for people to think she was classy.”
“That’s the name on her birth certificate.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you saying that wasn’t her real name?”
West shrugged. I half wondered if she was senile.
She asked what I did up in Canada. I told her, adding, “She didn’t approve of the whole modelling, acting thing.”
“She didn’t?” Annie sipped her lemonade “She sure loved being in front of an audience herself. But I guess when all was said and done … church it ain’t.”
“She tried church for a bit. Thought it was misogynist bullshit in the end.”
“What?”
“She was a big feminist activist.”
“Women’s lib,” Annie snarled with disgust. “She was curious about that crap and the Vietnam marches—me, I like a door opened for me. I used to say, you’ll be sorry when you get drafted—all that feminism. What about you?” she asked suspiciously.
“I enjoy being a girl.”
“Yeah.” She reached for the pictures, her own shot sitting on top. “Christ, age is a sunovabitch. This goddamn ankle is going to take a coon’s age to heel.” She stared …“Oh for godsake, this was a hell of a night, the night she got this one. What does that say? Can you read that?”
Sinatra’s face turned to me and, by heart, I recited, “‘You’re cruel, baby! But when you’re right, you’re right. Frank.’”
“She was a real pisser when she was mad. So was he for that matter.”
“Where was she born? I thought she was from Toronto and then I read she was from Pennsylvania.”
“Toronto—no, no, no, whatsits, the ritzier suburb upstate—Scarsdale! Her parents had this real nice house in Scarsdale.”
“She was American?”
“Of course. Scarsdale, New York. I think her mother came from money. And the crazy stepfather was a professor in town. She took lots of ballet and piano and singing and all that jazz. She almost became a ballerina. But then she started into the show business type of dancing like they had in the nightclubs.”
“Did you work together in nightclubs? Is that how you met her?”
“She waitressed in this bar a few of us used to go to. But she got fired.”
“In New York?”
“Uh-huh. I used to go to this after-hours joint called The 92.”
“In Little Italy? That’s in this book I was reading, this girl who became a mob wife started out working there.”
Annie gave me a blank look. “Yeah. Well, it wasn’t much of a place but a couple of us girls were dating guys who went there. This fella, Micky D, I used to go around with, he took me in there sometimes. They had this good-looking waitress called Audrey all the fellas liked. I didn’t think much of her—skinny—but anyways this one night I go in there after work, it was probably three in the morning. You could go any time of night if you were the right people. In those days, stripteasers were special, like celebrities; people knew who we were, we got invitations everywhere and the fellas liked having us on their arms. Anyways, Audrey had these catty blue eyes and Micky D, my fella, said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Which was a bit of a stretch. But they liked her, those guys.”
“Audrey was my mother? Celia?”
“She had dark hair like yours then.” Her eyes clouded back into the place she was before my interruption: “This one night some guy comes in, older square-looking fella says he’s looking for Audrey. The bouncer tells him it’s a private party but he starts calling, ‘Audrey! Audrey!’ She gives the okay and the fella goes over to her but we couldn’t hear much until they started yelling. Crazy sunovabitch tried to drag her out the door. The bouncers were on him in a flash, of course, and the fella hollers, ‘I’m her father. She’s sixteen years old. I’m calling the police.’ Audrey says, ‘You’re not my father.’ Next thing you know, the bouncers got hold of him. She’s screaming, he’s screaming. Finally they threw him out. A lot of people got up and left just in case he did call the cops and Jimmy, the fella that ran the joint, brought her to a booth and had a talk with her.
“I say to Micky D, ‘How do you like her now, y’pedophile?’ He says, ‘Why you gotta be like that for?’ and goes over to the booth where she’s crying. Next thing you know, Jimmy’s holding her one hand and Micky’s got the other and I’m sitting there thinkin’, She’s underage so fire her tush and send her home. Pretty clear to me. But, then, Teddy the Ghost gets in on the action. Teddy was this, ah, well-connected older fella who used to come in. Micky comes back to me and says, ‘You think you can get Audrey a job at the club? They need any singers?’
“I say, ‘Are you kidding? She’s sixteen!’ And he says, ‘Yeah, the whole joint heard. We gotta get her out of here in case the bulls come. Just gotta fix her up first.’ And there’s Audrey sitting by herself, so I went over and tried to help her out. I knew a guy looking for stage acts for the carnival so I gave her his number. Low-rent operation but it wasn’t bad. A lot of girls danced carnival in the summertime when the clubs were slow. I used to dance the big state fairs—the Royal American and Raynell Golden shows—they did some nice reviews, almost like it used to be in the theatres. Anyway, The Boys got her some ID so she’d be able to work and I didn’t see her again till she showed up in Vegas calling herself Celia.”
It was Annie’s eyes that looked catty to me now. “I heard she ended up doing the geek show at the carnival because it was so rough on the other side.”
“Geek show? I don’t know anything about that,” Annie said, jerking her head no. “She was a dancer. Carnival is a lot of fun. It’s not like everybody thinks, real tacky and dirty and this and that. No. A lot of girls were carnival people.”
I sat quiet a second, splicing her words with what I’d heard and read, then changed the subject. “Teddy the Ghost, the mafia guy?”
“Mafia guy? Where’d you hear a thing like that?”
“I read it. He was connected to the Gambino family in New York. Teodoro Gossitino?”
“That’s crap,” she snapped. “He gambled a little, that’s all. People like to make a big deal. Too much TV.”
“Didn’t he go to jail for murder and racketeering?”
“Taxes,” she said and hoisted herself out of her chair, hobbled to the counter and poured vodka over the bottom of her glass. “How’s your drink?”
My glass was still half-full. “I’m fine. Oh right, he got convicted on tax evasion. I’ve been reading so much stuff … Someone said he was Celia Dare’s boyfriend.”
“No-o,” Annie growled and turned from the counter. “He was like a father to her. A whatsits—avuncular type. He didn’t want her working in bars, getting into trouble, you know, he thought she was real smart, the kind of girl who could make something of herself. She told me he wanted to send her to stewardess school. He took her travelling. Florida and that.”
“Why would he take her travelling if he wasn’t her boyfriend?”
Her face soured. “Because. It was kind of a part-time job for her, being his assistant. Sometimes, these business fellas, if they travel alone, they become targets for speculation. Less problems if you’re in a couple then people don’t get all funny.” She leaned back now as if I was an irritant she didn’t want to get too close to. “She came to Vegas with Teddy.”
My hand went to my hair, reminding me that I was in disguise. A good spy knows better than to be a pushy bitch. “So … I read on-line that she sang with Louis Prima one night.”
Her face softened. “That’s right. She did that. Keely wasn’t feeling good one night and Prima met Celia at one of his shows and she was friends of friends and he asked her to fill in.”
“So, she had a good voice.”
“She didn’t do striptease at first. She wanted to get famous for being a singer and dancer but she was more like an impersonator, you know. She didn’t really have her own style. You have to
have your own style to get famous singing. She was a good impersonator though. She could do anybody. Sounded just like Keely that one night.”
“How did she go from that to stripping?”
“Well,” she said, her eyes darting into her drink, her voice rising. “I remember another gal that wanted to be an opera star but her agent told her she’d never make it in opera, that she’d do better as a stripper. Hettie Bay her name was. She married a light-and-sound man in Hollywood; she lives in Palos Verdes. She’s quite elderly. Just about all of the girls wanted to be something. You don’t just say, Oh, I want to be a stripper. I can hardly wait to be one of those. No, you start that way because it’s a way you can get a job and then you find out how much money you’re making.”
The room went silent. After a few moments I said, “And so she dated Frank Sinatra?”
“No. I dated him. That’s sort of how we connected again. I came out to Vegas for a run at the Silver Slipper. That was a good club to work at—wasn’t so much the superstar acts performing but it was an inside-crowd joint, you know. Sinatra would come hang around there or Sammy Davis Jr.” Her face brightened. “Very informal, you didn’t have to wear a tie so you could be relaxed if you wanted. The first week I was in town, I decided to treat myself to a stay at the Sands—the Slipper didn’t have guest rooms so most performers got themselves an apartment a block or two off the Strip. But, like I say, I wanted to spoil myself. I used to go casino-hopping. That’s the big sport in Vegas. I’d go here and there, catch the shows, and I was meeting all kinds of people—Keely Smith and Louis Prima, they had the biggest lounge act that ever hit Las Vegas. They were the wildest. Whoever had them lost money. You know why? Because the croupiers just stood there—everybody left the tables and you could stand around and watch them free. Nobody played the tables when Prima was on. Lord he was wild.
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